


A second chance/ a second go-around in this rat-race we call whatever it is

by AuntyAgonee



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, The Kane Chronicles - Rick Riordan
Genre: Changed genders but not gender bends, Changed races/ethnicities, Children, Gender dysmorphia, Multi, Poor Reyna comes outta Jason's vagina, Reincarnation, University
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-14
Updated: 2015-03-14
Packaged: 2018-03-17 19:18:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3540974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuntyAgonee/pseuds/AuntyAgonee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I can’t really remember how I died. It was unexpected- I do remember that very clearly.</p>
<p>In which Percy is resurrected in a kind of unexpected way. He struggles with various things, such as gender dysmorphia and having his once arch-nemesis as a semi-loving father, being separated from his friends and trying not to meet his former self as the other-Percy jets around saving the world and getting the girls (and one boy, unintentionally).</p>
            </blockquote>





	A second chance/ a second go-around in this rat-race we call whatever it is

**Author's Note:**

> One shot word vomit, I think, and twelve pages of it.  
> However the idea of the heroes being reincarnated does interest me as I always wondered where they would end up. How would they be heroes in their second lives to keep working towards getting those points for the Isles of Blest? Would they still know each other? Would they still love each other after that as well?  
> So I ended up writing up a headcanon in a long, lone 12-page one shot. Stick through it if you can. If not, just know that Percy grows gills at the end and swims off to become a pirate.

I can’t really remember how I died.  
The details don’t seem all that important to me, after all this time. Sure, at first I was hopping mad to find myself dead at only nineteen (twenty? Early twenties, twenty-two at the latest) after the battles, traumas, betrayal and prophecies I had clawed my way through to be where I was when I died. I mean, I saved human society and the world at large more times than I can count on my hands and still I died young, glorious as a warrior, sure, but totally unfulfilled as person. Plans are a dangerous thing for a demigod to make, but I seem to remember that I was full of them right up to the day of my death.  
It was unexpected- I do remember that very clearly.  
Annabeth and Grover were there at the very beginning, so it was only fitting that they were there for the very end too. Grover and I had grown apart since the second Titanomachy. Not his fault, not mine. I just had more in common with the others after spending months on the run from both of the camps, fighting for my life more than usual and even falling into Tartarus in their company. Nico was there too, which was nice, because he was a classic contender in my early quests and it was also kinda like having the Angel of Death holding your hand while the lights blinked out. I think he might have been the one holding me too when I checked out, because Annabeth ran to get help even though I had begged her to stay.  
I knew that was it, and so did Nico, seeing as that’s kind of his job. Grover was still hopeful.  
My blood was all over the place.   
My last couple of words are scrawled on my brain. You remember a thing like that, if you remember that you are dead.  
“So, what do you think? Elysium’s a shoo-in, right?” I said.  
“Don’t talk, Percy.” said Grover.  
“Nah. You’re going to hell.” said Nico.  
I laughed and tasted more blood “Gods, I vandalise one church sign and I’m condemned to hell forever.”  
“Definitely.” said Nico.  
“Where the hell is Annabeth?” said Grover.  
“Come and visit me sometime.” I said “You and Hazel. Everyone… but not Leo. They might not let him out twice.”  
“We could hide him.” suggested Nico “Slap a bowler hat on him and call him Uncle Jorge.”  
“Nah. They’d catch you at customs. They have dogs specially trained to sniff out fire-breathing mechanics.”  
Grover begged me to stop talking. I told Nico to tell Annabeth I loved her and to tell Jason not to use his toothbrush because I had accidentally cleaned mud off my shoes with it. My last physical sensation was his cold hand squeezing my colder hand, then my eyes closed of their own accord and I was completely, totally gone.  
That church thing, by the way, was one of the memories that stood out as being a pleasant bonding moment that didn’t involve a life-or-death battle. It was me and Frank, walking through one of those weird pockets of suburb you can find in New York and we walked past a sign outside a church declaring: ‘HOMOSEXUALITY IS NOT THE PATH TO GOD’. Unable to resist, I removed the ‘NOT’ from the sign and ran like hell, dragging Frank behind me and by the time we reached the end of the block, we were both crying with laughter, slightly hysterical with the fear that an enraged, homophobic priest might follow the ‘smell of sin’ we were leaving and beat us both with his Bible.  
Actually, my judges did mention that.  
Thalia had died earlier that year, and as she was presiding over the dead with the other kings of the past, the children of Zeus, as a judge on the day I ended up in front of them (in the express line, by virtue of being a hero), she remembered the church scene as one of the times I stood up for the disenfranchised. Out of all the times she could have picked. Forget the wars: Percy vandalised a hate-crime, definitely the opus of his career. I get the feeling she only mentioned that one because she wanted an excuse to smile at me, to let me know our side was the same one and that she was going to be helping me move into Elysium as soon as her shift was over.  
My years in Elysium were not lonely, as I had expected.  
They were full. Of course, I missed my tribe of morons terribly and spent a good portion of every day wondering what they were doing, apart from ageing and bleeding and missing me, wondering what I was doing. In a strange turn of events, I ended up living next door to one Esmerelda Valdez, who was pretty much the original blueprint for her son. Explosions sounded from her work-shop at all hours, punctuated by a psychotic cackle that announced a break-through or that she had managed to punch a hole through the wall again. She had the same sort of impish features, that grin that would have made me follow her into any kind of crazy situation, provided I had a SWAT shield and fire extinguisher handy.  
She was sort of my best friend in the underworld. It didn’t matter that she was well into her thirties, either. She loved hearing about her son and what he had done. The fire-starting and the flying mechanical dragons didn’t surprise her in the slightest- she was more surprised to hear he had a steady relationship going when I died, claiming her side of the family was unbelievably tragic when it came to the romance department.  
For reasons of my own, I didn’t stick around long enough to meet any of the others when they died. I knew from the time when Drew Tanaka arrived in Elysium (a piano fell on her from ten stories up, if you can believe it) that it was totally possible my friends would show up as the teenagers they had been when I bit the dust. I also knew it was totally possible they would stay in their thirties, as they were by the time Drew joined me, preferring to look like the people they had matured into, like the parents of the children they were sure to have soon, if not already.  
Drew decided she wanted another shot at life less than a week after she came. I decided to join her. In the ten or so years I had been in Elysium, no gods, spirits or old friends had ever come to see me and I could only guess that there must have been a decree issued from Olympus to enforce this, in case somebody decided to resurrect me to use in a quest against the gods or whatever. They must have been pretty damned strict- normally, you couldn’t keep Annabeth away with a bonfire or a pitch-fork.  
Rebirth was my only chance to meet them again, I assumed, in the future. Wouldn’t it be weird if I were reincarnated as somebody’s child? I imagined myself growing up all over again calling Frank ‘Dad’ and before I knew it, Esmerelda was waving me and Drew off from the poppy-strewn banks as we waded into the river.

I am four years old.  
There is a song on the radio being aired for the first time, but I know all the words. My father watches me in astonishment as I sing along to the lyrics and hum the tune during the instrumental parts. When the song ends, I lose interest in the radio and continue playing with the plastic dinosaurs he finally gave in and bought last week.   
“Have you heard that song before?” he asks.  
At this stage, I am still not sure if the people I know in my head are people I will ever know, so I don’t tell him about how I used to sing that song with a girl with choppy black braids and beads in her hair. Instead, I pick up one of my numerous Barbie dolls and push her head into the gaping maw of my new T-rex, making it growl and chew her skull.

I am eight years old.  
I am trying to persuade my father over-all’s are a better idea than the dresses he insists I should wear. When I wear over-all’s and put my hair up, people can’t tell if I am a girl or a boy. Sometimes, they make the mistake of referring to me as my father’s ‘son’. He will cringe and glance at me uncertainly, as if knowing I had quietly introduced myself by that ‘pretend name’ again when he wasn’t looking, and he will correct them with an air of embarrassment.  
“Amy, I don’t understand,” he gestures to the girls’ rack “Your friends are all still in dresses, aren’t they? As long as you wear shorts under them then it’s alright for you to climb trees.”  
My father thinks girls should wear dresses at this age. It’s no use telling him about Annabeth and Hazel and Piper, how they never wore dresses and still fit comfortably in their gender. Or about Reyna, whom I had never seen in a dress except for once, and she claimed it was laundry day in her cohort.  
I shrug “I just don’t like dresses.”  
He shakes his head in amazement “You’ve never liked them.”  
“Then why do you make me wear them?”  
My father doesn’t answer.  
I shouldn’t have said anything. He already suspects I am much older than my chubby face and tiny body suggests. Who knows where he would put me if he discovered the people living in my head? The monsters I make him check the closet for are disconcerting enough, so if he found the fire-starters and the necromancers, the gods and the war I know so well, it might be enough for him to hand me over to some white-coated team that would revel at the chance to study a case like mine.  
My father loves me.  
He is also a little bit afraid of me.

I am twelve and a half years old and this is the moment I have spent a life-time waiting for.  
In a strange turn of events, Hazel has managed to hang onto everything.  
That is still her own smile on her face, and her face is still her own. Perhaps she didn’t change because even though there is another Hazel in the world, that Hazel will not return to the living for at least another five years. She is safe for the moment.  
She sits on the edge of the fountain. We are in a mall. I am waiting for a friend, and going by the boredom on her face and the thick book in her hands, Hazel must have opted out of a shopping trip with one of her parents.  
“Hazel.” I say.  
Hazel looks me up and down. Her face contorts with pain at first, then grief that no child should ever feel, then finally relief.  
“I didn’t recognise you at first.”  
I glance down at my body, which remains stubbornly straight, despite the promises of puberty. The only way you can really tell which gender I am is by the slight bumps of my tiny, tiny breasts, an even they look like a trick of the light when I wear the baggy shirts I favour. Still, it is hard to deny my biological gender with the long hair. I haven’t lost many fights with my father, but he’s not ready for the hair to go, and I’m not sure I can bring myself to torment him the way it would if I pulled a Piper and took a pair of scissors to my hair.  
I sit next to her, our shoulders pressed together.  
“What’s your name now?” I ask “You wouldn’t believe what my dad saddled me with this time around.”  
Hazel smiles “I’m Bianca.”  
I roll my eyes “Bad joke, Hazie. Really bad joke.”  
She doesn’t laugh along with me “I’m not kidding. My name is Bianca Vargas.” she glances at her arm, considering a skin colour that is basically the same as it was before “I know I don’t look very Italian.”  
“To the untrained eye. You’re doing that thing where you talk with your hands.”  
Hazel smiles “Yeah, and I can’t stop drinking black coffee.”  
She put her book on her knees and hugs me. I hug her back, squeezing the breath out of her. Tears well up in her eyes and she swipes at them furiously, and I find myself wishing I could cry along with her. Right now, I’m too numb on the inside with the shock, the relief, to know how I really feel.  
She holds me at arm’s length “How old are you right now? Gods, you’re so young.”  
“I’m thirteen in October.” I examine Hazel’s face, marvelling that I have never seen her so young either.  
If her grin were any wider, her face would split in half “Me too! On Halloween?”  
For the first time in thirteen years, something like the pure, unbridled joy I was used to feeling in rushes whenever I looked at my friends comes back and takes me totally unawares.  
“Yeah! Halloween’s my birthday too!”  
We laugh and exchange a high-five. Hazel scrawls her number on the inside of my arm, making me swear to call her and meet her next weekend at the very latest.  
When my friend does show up, we part ways reluctantly. The feeling of buoyancy in my chest is so great I loop my arm through my friend’s to keep myself tethered to the earth.  
“Who was that, then?” asks my friend.  
I grin at her “Somebody I knew in a past life.”  
Sadie Kane shakes her in wonder “Wish I could make you smile like that.”

I am fourteen in two weeks.  
The decorations of the season, which I loathe as utterly tacky and horrendous to look at, are up and I’m tapping my foot impatiently as I wait for the bus. The wind cuts through my jacket, despite its thickness. A woman examines me out of the corner of her eye, probably trying to determine my gender. These days, I like to keep people guessing with carefully neutral and baggy clothes and the ponytail with the heavy fringe.  
Hazel waits for me at the library. Her parents, two charming Italians I have never met in this life nor the last until the day I met them, tried to move her out of state last year, but she resisted them so violently and determinedly they had no choice but to stay- or leave the state without their only daughter. We cling to each other as best we can. So far, we are the only ones that have cropped up in this life and just in case it stays that way, and I am praying to Olympus it doesn’t, we’re not going to be separated.  
The bus comes. The driver looks at me twice as I pay my fare, manages to make out my breasts as the jacket is momentarily pulled taut by my stretching, and reclines in his chair like it was a load off his mind to find them. I don’t look before I pick my seat, which is a terrible mistake.   
“S’cuse me.” mutters Ethan Nakamura, tugging a bag’s strap out from under me.  
He keeps his face turned to the side, hiding his scar.  
Hazel and I have rehearsed moments like these. Sometimes, we make it so that we run into our friends when they are still the friends that will travel on the Argo II and wage war against Gaia, and we imagine the ways we will try to act normal while we interact with them. Sometimes, we make it so that we meet ourselves, in which case Hazel will have to run like hell or she, in her past life, will suspect Nico of having yet another sister he refuses to talk about.  
I never predicted I would run into a ghost like this.  
Only in my worst nightmares. I’m about to get up and go, but I catch sight of his scar in the reflection in the window. Tense, his shoulders squared. He expects me to recoil.   
If we’ve been calculating our time-lines right, I am going to be the death of this boy in about four months. The absolute least I can do for him is to sit beside him, pretending I don’t notice and that I don’t care about the hideous, puckered scar I inflicted.  
“My name is Amy.”  
Ethan glances at me in alarm and surprise. He waits for the punchline.  
“What’s yours?”  
He lies “Jason.”  
I wonder if he knows why he has chosen that name “I think I know you from school, don’t I?”  
“Why are you talking to me?” his voice is low and hoarse.  
“Because I think you might be in my science class and I don’t know what the homework was.”  
The bags under his eyes remind me of Nico right after he got out of the jar “It’s not make-up, if that’s what you’re going to ask. The scar.”  
“Good for you. But do you know anything about cell biology? I’ve got this big-ass test on Monday and I still have no goddamned idea what a nucleus is.”  
Ethan blinks. He glances from side-to-side, searching for the ambush of enemy demigods. Eventually, he consents to walking me through the basic components of a cell, and his knowledge is actually pretty exhaustive.  
He could have been a doctor. That’s what I think when I watch him get off the bus and thank him for his help, knowing he will be dead in a few weeks, sacrificed for a peace that will last less than a year.

I turned fourteen three months ago.  
Hazel and I celebrated together, quietly, wanting only each other’s company as usual. Sadie has her own agenda to attend to, so I haven’t even told her when my birthday is for fear of making her feel like a bad friend. She doesn’t suspect a thing about me, and I consider it an interesting privilege to be able to watch how the Egyptian side lives. Even death didn’t take away my ability to see through the Mist.  
I can see the boy who follows her. He waved to us, confused that we were able to see him. We waved back.  
“That’s a god of death.” whispered Hazel.  
“Is it just me, or do all gods of death look a whole lot like Nico?”  
She smacked me on the arm and told me I was scandalous.  
Today, there is a small scandal going on in my house.  
My father told me about her sometime last month, in that shuffling and embarrassed manner he takes on when he tells me about something he has been doing behind my back. He looked that way when he told me about the appointments he had arranged with a psychiatrist (who remains as bewildered as my father is by the depression, unable to find a cause that can be explained by chemicals or trauma, afraid to tell us I had the textbook symptoms of PTSD even though I had never set foot in any kind of battleground as far as they knew). This time, it’s much happier news.  
“She’s very nice,” he promises me “She’s got a son that’s not that much younger than you.”  
“Is he coming tonight too?”  
He nods “Are you sure you don’t want to wear something a little more…proper?”  
I shake my head “Plenty of girls wear slacks and dress shirts to respectable places. Bianca does it all the time.”  
He frowns “Bianca could lead you off a bridge by the hand, I swear.”  
She is forty years old, the same age as my dad. I don’t know this woman, but I know her son. The child shies behind her for the first few minutes of the introductions, still small enough to hide his face in the small of her back and not be too embarrassed by it. He peeks at me shyly through the crook of his mother’s elbow, then he comes forward and shakes my hand very formally.  
She calls him Noor.  
Later, when I offer to take him outside to get some fresh air while the adults discuss adult business, I call him Piper, and he cries with happiness to hear his real name again.

I am sixteen when Piper and I legally become siblings.   
We spend the week before convincing my father, now our father, to let me wear a suit to the wedding and he only relents when my new mother steps in, saying she thinks I’d look much more dashing in a suit, and anyway with me in a suit she doesn’t have to worry about my dress out-doing hers.  
While they honeymoon in Hawaii, Piper and I take advantage of the absence to have Hazel over every night and set me up with a new wardrobe.  
Piper has well and truly risen to the challenge of becoming a boy, so she sits outside my closed bedroom door while Hazel and I wrestle my chest into a binder.  
“It says here they can make people pass out.” her voice broke a couple of months ago and I still can’t hear her speak without snorting.  
“I’m not going to wear it all the time,” I wince as Hazel snaps the elastic between my shoulder-blades “Some days I just need these bastards out of the way.”  
“I almost didn’t know it was you when you walked into class yesterday, with Pipes’ shirt on. You really looked different.” Hazel straightens the binder out and claps me on the shoulder “They should sell these things with an assistant.”  
“I know, right? It’s a science to keep this thing on all day.”  
“Sadie’s texting me. She wants to know if you want to do something on Sunday…she says bring Hazel and me.”  
Seeing Sadie is becoming more and more dangerous. Soon, she will meet Hazel properly and we may have to sever all contact to avoid awkward questions. I can’t pretend the prospect of cutting Sadie off excites me.  
“Tell her to look up movie times.”

I am eighteen years old and I am so goddamn happy to see Leo I make the mistake of hurling myself at him in front of my father. He catches me and squeezes the life out of me. A moment ago I told my father, mother and brother I have no idea who my roommate is, so I’m going to need a creative lie.  
Thankfully, he’s thinking the same things “Holy shit, man! I haven’t seen you since camp!”  
Actually, he’s probably thinking ‘hey look at that Percy has tits this is going to be interesting’, because my binders have all mysteriously disappeared since the last time I let my father into my room to clean it.  
“I didn’t know you were coming here!” I wriggle out of his arms and give him a fist-bump, flustered and more excited than I have been since I met Piper again “How weird is this? I thought you were another Kwon!”  
He snorts “Yeah, like half of the Korean population of the world is named Kwon, I don’t blame you.”  
“We might be in the wrong room,” whispers my father to my mother “Her roommate is supposed to be a girl as well, right?”  
My mother gives him a look of barely disguised reproach “Let’s talk about it later, Luke.”  
Piper speed-walks over to Leo and shakes his hand, all business-like “Hi, I’m Amphitrite’s brother.”  
Leo barely stops himself from cracking up “And your name is?”  
“Noor…and you are?”  
“Jun Kwon,” he leans in a little closer, seeing our parents have left “My gods Perce you are so fucking blonde.”  
“You’re Korean,” I punch him in the arm playfully “That’s really different.”  
“We’re brothers,” says Piper “Percy has boobs, but he’s still a boy up here (she taps her temple) and I don’t think I really care which one I am.”  
“Hold on a moment, you need to see somebody.”  
Leo pops his head around the door “Hey, Jamie and Santi! Can you guys come in here for a minute? I’ve got some weirdoes in my room!”  
Santi is a girl so tall she has to duck to get in and Jamie is a smaller, sullen-looking boy that trails in her shadow. Santi lets out a very girly shriek when she sees us and sweeps me and Piper up in a hug that produces a crunch from my spine.   
“I fucking told you they’d be in New York, didn’t I?”  
Jamie lingers in the doorway, unsure if he should be happy to see us or pissed off that he has had to wait for eighteen years.  
He settles for somewhere in between.  
“Fucking reincarnation,” he mutters “I hope you’re hiding my sister somewhere nearby.”

“You’re getting your name changed?”  
I nod “Amphitrite is a hassle on its own without all the gender complication shit going for it too.”  
Sadie tilts her head back and lowers a strawberry lace into her mouth with a fierce look of concentration “I reckon you’re name’s never been Amy, y’know? When I met you, you didn’t say your name was Amy. You didn’t tell me your name, I had to learn it from other people and your lot from the uni never call you Amy.”  
This is true. There have been a great deal of narrow misses, since Sadie has met the ‘lot from uni’. She knows us now, just in a different life. We call each other by the names we recognise, so it’s a conscious decision to call each other these alien terms, like ‘Santi’ and ‘Jamie’.   
It won’t be too long before Leo comes back from his stint at being dead, and that’s when everything will really kick off. The Argo II will fly again, both of the camps and every single one of the Egyptian Nomes will join forces against powers I try not to think about these days, because knowing Gaia was the source of those incessant little earthquakes two years ago almost drove me crazy with the urge to grab my friends, a good sword and hit the road for Rome.  
Sometimes I think she recognises us and the only thing keeping her from figuring us out are the scraps of Mist that have clung to us from the old days- the only remnant, by the way. No more breathing underwater for me, and I’ve filled my sinuses a number of times testing that.  
Sadie chews rapidly. She tends to stuff her face with sugar when she gets upset, and considering she’s had about five packets of different types of candy (‘sweets’) since we met each other an hour ago, I’m guessing she must have just had her first flight (what a fun day that was: I had to hijack Peleus from Thalia’s tree to save Carter from a bad situation, but it turned out to be Sadie dialling for Annabeth and we were chased through the upper-stratosphere for about three hours by birds with teeth for eyes).  
“Dad’s not too happy,” for me, saying that is like remarking it is raining heavily when I come through the door soaking wet “He must be dreading making all the calls around the family circle. Telling people to update my name on the Christmas cards list. Amy is so easy to get used to, but my boy name? Weird.”  
“You are a boy,” Sadie pats my bound chest “What are you doing with these things, by the way?”   
“Donating them to the buxomly challenged.”  
She snorts and pats her own flattish chest “Real nice.”  
A mother sitting a few tables over from us clears her throat and casts a dirty look our way, which makes us laugh.  
“Maybe we should stop feeling ourselves up now, yeah? So, are you going to…you know?”  
“Keep my surname?” for some reason, a lot of people who don’t actually know the history behind my surname (so that’s everyone except for the resurrected people) have been asking me that “Yeah. I don’t think I need to change it.”  
Sadie’s face falls “You’re slipping away from me, love, you really are. One minute you’re getting caught in your binder and angsting over which bathroom to use and then I turn around and you’re changing your dumb name to something even dumber.” she reaches across the table and squeezes my hand “I wish I was there for it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me…I don’t know where I’m going, these days…I’ve got this great lot of brilliant, manic people converging from me on all sides and I’m worried they’re going to pluck me up and out of my life and carry me off to a land of…fire-breathing mechanics and adorable, Italian necromancers and amazingly hot boys with shark teeth and gills in his neck.”  
Her gaze falls to the table. The poster child of dejection right here, folks, summon the Webster people and get her picture next to the word in the dictionary.  
Problem is I know she’s right. I know she and I and a whole lot of the others are going to be gone for two months and Sadie’s never going to be able to return to her normal life. She talked to me about the other version of me, this one, and it would be with this wistful look on her face as she wondered if I had finally given up my vow of chastity and gotten with someone- boy or girl or in between?  
“What about…shape-shifters?”  
A shiver runs through her body.  
She stares at me and knows it’s me for a moment, then reality and logic take over and she breaks into an uneasy smile “Sure. Chinese-Canadian shape-shifters, all over the place. We’ve not got the room for all of them.”  
There aren’t many days like this left, where we can just go out to a coffee shop and discuss my changing names and her increasing, always inexplicable absences. From what I have been told by the others, Sadie is going to enter the Underworld one day and assume a certain role, a certain throne, possibly against her will, and none of us will hear from her again.  
“I like it.”  
“What?”  
“I really like your name. I like that you stuck with the fishy, mythological puns. It’s got a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Nemo Castellean.” From the smile she gives me, I know this is the last time we will see each other.

I am graduating tomorrow.  
It’s strange, but suddenly the priorities of this life and the former have become as important as each other and I’m not sure what I want more.  
Annabeth, Reyna and Frank could all be graduating with us today, and so could Piper if she hadn’t been behind the rest of us by two years.  
Our father could also be here. Our mother has sent ahead the news that she will be coming, but that we shouldn’t expect dear old dad to make an appearance. The ‘Nemo’ thing made a deep impression. Hell, it might have even pierced through the thick haze around his older memories and stirred some things that have reminded him why he is truly afraid of his own child.   
“We’re so old.”  
Leo is in the process of peeling up the duct tape. For the last four years, our room has been split by a line of duct tape that has been repaired and re-sized many times. An old trick from the Argo II: Leo gets his own space to drench in mechanical pieces and we let him be, as long as he doesn’t start revving up a V8 on his desk in the middle of the night.  
“Twenty two. Totally decrepit,” agrees Leo “You might pass out on your way across the stage. Want me to get a stretcher ready, just in case?”  
I stand in front of the mirror, working on my tie. Twenty- two years in this body, gods only know how many years overall in this world, and ties remain as much of a mystery to me as the insides of a black hole.  
“Did you think we were going to be like this?”  
Leo ducks under his bed and retrieves a textbook that hasn’t seen the light of day since I decided a trans-gender doing Women’s Studies wasn’t gonna fly with the radical feminist group and I needed to run for my life “You mean in college? Like, graduating with actual degrees?”  
“Shut up, MIT boy,” I’m still having a hard time pretending I’m not mad that Leo has been scooped up from the job market before he even got onto it properly, but that’s what I get for keeping company with geniuses “I mean did you think we were going to end up living a second life? But not in the future for some reason.”  
“Why the hell would I think that?”  
I fumble around a knot “I don’t know. You died twice. I guess…didn’t you see things?”  
Leo doesn’t talk much about the process that involved him coming back to life, and whatever Nico and Hazel know they’re not telling us. From what I’ve gleaned, I think he must have punched the Angel of Death in its sexless crotch and leaped through a conveniently open window, because that’s how he gets out of most of his troubles these days.  
“I’ll tell you what I saw. I saw Gaia, the Dirty Bitch herself, in my dragon’s claws and I saw a certain doom that I was kinda alright with. Then at the literal last second of my life I see this screaming, blonde-ish thing come flying out of nowhere and I’m thinking ‘holy shit is that Jason’, then I’m dead. That was what I saw.”  
He is half-underneath the bed, sweeping out piles of stuff that have been hiding under my bed for years.  
“It was really nice of you not to kill Nico for punching you with Octavian before you died,” cursing in Ancient Greek, I wrap the tie around my neck and pretend to hang myself from it “All’s I’m saying is turning up in the same world as the same people, but in different lives, that’s kinda cheating. The gods are cheap with their heroes.”  
“Maybe this is a grace period,” says Leo, his voice muffled “We get some time to chill and procreate in this life, then the one after this is gonna be another nightmare of big ass monsters wanting to eat me and girls wanting me all over the place-”  
“What girls?” Nico appears in the door noiselessly, with startling speed “The literal ice queen? The one that could only parrot back the last couple of words of what you said? Or the ship-wrecked one with the Stockholm fever?”  
“Ah, there’s the little ray of sunshine,” says Leo cheerfully “Kick him in the stomach for me, Perce.”  
“Are we going to have to have another talk about obvious sexual tension? Can you guys please just make out after graduation so we can all move on with our lives?”  
Nico bats my hands away from the tie and fixes it expertly “I don’t think you’re in any position to instruct me on my relationships.”  
I grin “Because I’m still waiting on my possibly-still-a-lady-love? I think you’re just jealous because I got perfect Disney love and you got dysfunctional Dreamworks love.”  
“Hey, here’s that fucking paper! I told you guys I did it! Fucking paper fairies are hiding my things again.”  
The knock on the door surprises us all.  
As a general rule, no one knocks. If someone does end up disturbing somebody changing or something more intimate, they are shouted at and chased away with shoes thrown at the door.   
Knowing this, I freeze and stare turn mechanically towards the door.  
“Hi, Dad.”  
“Come and help me find Santi and Bianca.” Nico grabs Leo by the arm before he can utter a word of greeting or warning and darts past my father and into the hallway, leaving me alone with him.  
He looks me up and down in slight dismay “You look good.”  
I shrug “Yeah.”  
He clears his throat “Noor told me you were ill.”  
Dammit Piper. I’m going to punch her so hard in her man-face it turns concave.  
“I’m not.”  
He shakes his head “No. You’re not…you look perfectly healthy.”  
I gesture towards my now empty desk “Do you want to sit down or something?”  
Clearly, he is not at all at ease in this room. The mess isn’t too bad, but he hasn’t seen it once in the four years I have lived here apart from the day I moved in. He hasn’t seen me much either, which must be why his eyes are popping out of his skull at the sight of my flattened, broad shape.  
“Noor is calling you something different these days,” he folds his hands on his stomach, reminding me of when I was younger and about to get a lecture for tracking mud inside the house “So…so I figured we might as well make it official.”  
Extracting a clear folder from his bag, he fishes out a single, dog-eared document and hands it to me.  
He smiles weakly at me “We can get this changed after graduation, if you want.”   
I have to stare at my birth certificate for a few minutes to believe I am really holding it.

I am twenty six years old.  
It’s my turn to hold the baby now, which is a yay.  
Her name is Reyna, same as her past life. Leo has spent about ten minutes alternating between laughing and crying because he’s not sure if he should be glad that Reyna has finally made it here, or extremely weirded out that she made it out “through Jason’s vagina” as he so delicately put it. From the unmistakably sour look on her face, I can tell it’s our Reyna installed in this fresh lump of flesh. The nurses were incredibly amused when they handed her over to Jason and Piper, saying that had never seen a baby that looked so damned mad to be born before.  
“Hey Reyna. How’s it going?”  
She grabs my forefinger and puts the tip of it in her mouth, as if threatening to take the top off as soon as she has teeth.  
Piper ducks back into the room, finished with her call “Our parents are on their way, Perce. Mom’s gonna shit a brick when she hears the baby name. Like, a genuine brick. I promised her the baby would be Pari if she were a girl.”  
Jason wrinkles his brow “Doesn’t that mean ‘fairy’? Pipes, you can get me knocked up and force me through the agony of childbirth as many times as you want, but I won’t let you name my kid ‘fairy’.”  
Reyna squalls in what might be agreement and waves her hand vaguely in Jason’s direction.  
“Alright, alright. Back to your mom-dad.”  
At this point, Jason is a twenty-six year old woman with such a commanding presence and a hypnotic beauty he has literally caused a traffic accident, when a taxi driver took his eyes off the road too long to appreciate Jason’s spectacular ass and collided with a single mother of two who later admitted she was doing the same thing.  
He teaches Ancient History and English at a high-school, with a focus on the works of the Greek and Roman greats. We all think this totally perfect and spontaneously applaud whenever he tells us about sneaking in another obscure reference to an in-joke about our quests only he will find funny.  
Out of everyone in here, which is everyone, Jason is the one pulling down the smallest pay-check and that’s only because he likes teaching too much to pursue a more high-paying career, and because Piper’s career as a film director brings in more than enough. Then there’s Leo, working with NASA these days, and there’s Nico, who’s become a phycologist in a weird turn of events. They’d be pregnant by now too if it were biologically possible, and Leo keeps hinting vaguely at the possibility of adoption, although Nico seems determined not to talk about children.  
Only Hazel and I aren’t paired up at this point. Frank and Annabeth remain stubbornly missing and my main concern at this point is that when they do show up, they will do so as infants the way Reyna has. That’s too creepy, just too inappropriate to even think about pursuing the relationships where we left off.  
I’m pretty sure the others have begun to hope that Hazel and I will act on some crush we have been keeping quiet from them for ages, for fear of appearing deserting and cheating. There’s nothing of the sort between us, but I’m kind of beginning to wish there was.  
Reyna has reminded me of how fiercely I miss Annabeth.  
Jason must have caught the look on my face, because he says “Maybe Annabeth has a kid by now.”  
“Nice, Jason. Let’s talk about her happy marriage and white-picket fence next.” says Nico, who has been passed the baby.  
Reyna stares at his face, recognising him through the new face. He has her full attention, and her fingers are knotted in his shirt.  
“Hey, she might have a kid,” I shrug “She might have named it Percy Jr.”  
The others laugh and Jason winces “Jesus man, don’t make me laugh. The epidural doesn’t fix everything.”  
Leo is still giggling over Reyna’s face “Look at her…she’s like ‘why am I tiny, Nico, what did the gods do to me? My friends, they said, a second chance at life, they said. Nobody told me I’d be coming out of Jason’. Poor Reyna. Sucks to be you right now, sweetheart.”  
She swivels her eyes over towards him, unable to manoeuvre her fat head on her own, and gives him as dirty a look as a baby no older than ten hours can manage.

I am thirty one years old.  
The child at my feet was an unexpected bonus, so I named her Sadie in honour of the first bonus I got in this new life. She was left in a shoebox on my doorstep in the middle of the night as if someone could smell the emptiness in my house and took to me about as fast as baby-Reyna took to Nico, whom she likes better than her ‘biological parents’ at this point.  
I’m fairly sure Sadie is five years old now, but I can never be certain of her birthday thanks to the way she arrived at my house.   
A sticky mess of syrup and pancakes rings her mouth like a beard, and there are pieces of golden-brown pastry in her hair “Grandpa today?” her legs kick under the kitchen table “And Grandma?”  
“Well, Grandma might not feel very good today, so we’ll see,” I lean over the table and mop a string of syrup from her chin “But we sure can’t let Grandad know what a messy eater you are.”  
I have only just convinced Sadie of the wonders of cutlery- up until last month, she preferred to literally smash her face into her plate and eat whatever stuck in her mouth, so I had to put a shower-cap on her for a while.  
Sadie thinks of me as her father. She doesn’t yet understand that we are not related and if things go according to plan, she’ll think I adopted her from an orphanage rather than my doorstep. She may or may not know that I am physically her mother (call me crazy, but after a life-time of dealing with spirited attempts to murder me, I wasn’t over-eager to throw myself on the operating table at the mercy of good-natured strangers), but she senses something about me that is different.  
She knows that she knew me before I was born. It would have been cruel to Leo to call her by the name I knew her by, and with any luck he won’t notice for a little while longer.  
“Can we see Reyna?”  
“No, Reyna’s with Aunt Santi and Uncle Noor.”  
Furrowing her brow, Sadie stabs a big piece of pancake and gestures with it “Jun and Jamie? Bee-uncle?”  
Sadie hasn’t quite got a grip on ‘Bianca’ yet, but Hazel thinks it’s adorable. Hazel resents the fact that I was the one who ended up with the surprise baby, just a little bit. She isn’t ready to commit herself to a serious relationship yet, holding onto the chance that Frank might turn up as a 30 year old with his memories totally intact, which grows slimmer every day.  
“They’re all working today.”  
“How come you don’t work, Nemo?”  
“I do work,” I retort “I work hard while you’re asleep.”  
I have never missed my mother more than I have in the last four years. She said she looked forward to the day I had kids of my own, when she fully intended to pull up a deck chair, make herself some popcorn and watch chaos ensue as I ‘paid for my raising’ by dealing with my own kids.  
The pile of articles waiting to be written gets bigger, their deadlines closer, and Sadie manages to distract me every day with some new emergency or discovery, or a moment I can’t afford to miss. Still, she does spend an unfortunate amount of time playing on the floor of my office while I plough through a book review or a travel article about a place I’ve never been.  
Sadie’s eyes light up suddenly “Can we tell Grandad about my rocket? Can we show him?”  
“Uh, why don’t we wait until it’s done?”  
She is crestfallen, but I can’t afford to let her show it to him yet. I predicted I’d have mechanical genius to contend with when I figured out my daughter was a recycled Valdez, but I still have no idea how I’m going to hide it. I caught her building a gods-damned rocket in the playroom out of the radio, which she had dismantled with a screwdriver shop-lifted from the hard-ware store, and my alarm clock, which was missing for a week before it turned up in pieces around her. Unless Leo sticks his head under a rock and is wilfully and completely ignorant of the signals he’s going to notice before too long, he will figure out I am raising his mother and I’m not sure if we’re going to know how to treat the situation after that comes out.  
“What’s wrong with you? You’re all mopey.”  
I shake my head “Nothing. Finish your breakfast so I can get the rest of that beard off, alright?”  
Sadie folds her arm resolutely “No way. We need to talk about the stuff that makes us unhappy. Jamie says if I hold things in I’ll turn into a monster and try to eat my friends. He says I’m an alpha personality, so I’m gonna grow up with lots of…in…insegurities, and I’m gonna probably have low self-esteem if I don’t talk to my parent about it, so if I have to talk you do too.”  
Glowering, I reach for my phone and make myself a note to talk to Nico about phsyco-analysing my child “I’m not unhappy, Sadie. I like my life.”  
“Grandad says I need to go easy on you because you’re a tortured soul.” she counters.  
I gape, incredulous of the emotional weights my nearest and dearest seem determined to heap on my five-year-old’s narrow shoulders “Tortured soul? Do I look like a tortured soul to you?”  
She nods cheerfully “You’re sad when you think I’m not looking.”  
“Am not.” I can’t think of anything better to say.  
“Are too.”  
“Am not.”  
“Are too.”  
“Am totally not.”  
“You talk in your sleep about people called Frank and Annabelle.”  
Seeing my dumbfounded expression, she folds her arms with an air of triumph and grins.  
“Sadie, do you really wanna know what’s wrong with me?”  
She nods, drawing closer in her eagerness “Yeah, yeah, tell me, tell me.”  
“Ok…but when you’re older. Ask me when you’re thirteen.”  
Her cry of disappointment is almost feral. She springs for the phone, threatening to tell on me so Grandad will tell her everything and sprints from the room carrying my phone before I can protest.  
I let my head hit the table, muttering to myself “If the next thirteen years are going to be this way, I’m gonna find the return address on her shoebox.”  
But I can’t help but smile.  
Who knows what’s waiting in the next life? Anything and everything from Annabeth and Frank to another life as a demigod, or maybe an Egyptian magician again. Maybe I’ll get to know Sadie before I knew her, or next time it could be Carter. Maybe next time, Luke Castellan will be my child and I will be the father watching helplessly as she transitions from a daughter to a son. Maybe next time Frank and Hazel will be laughing over my unexpected debut in their maternity ward.  
I look around the messy kitchen and listen to my child thundering up the stairs, rehearsing her speech to her grandfather.  
Whatever comes next could be a million times worse than the little pocket of Elysium I carved out for myself in this particular life, so why trouble myself?  
Once I fought the wars that saved an oblivious world. Soon, I may do so again. But for now, I think I’ll lay down my sword and pick up a sponge, because that pile of dishes in the sink is going to earn me a scolding when my father gets here.

**Author's Note:**

> I lied about the ending and the only reason you know that is because you read all the way down here, for some reason.  
> Good job. It must have hurt though.
> 
> Also, remember when Grover was a thing? And Ethan and Luke? They were all a thing, once upon a time.


End file.
